Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework for secure, private, and efficient sharing of electronic medical records, specifically for cancer patient care, enhancing trust, security, and decision-making in healthcare.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain framework for EMR sharing that ensures privacy, security, and fine-grained access control, with a prototype implementation in collaboration with a hospital.

Findings

Prototype implementation demonstrates improved EMR sharing efficiency.

Framework ensures privacy, security, and access control.

Reduces turnaround time and costs in EMR sharing.

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall cost